


Born-Dead

by purpleeyesandbowties



Series: Addy and the Maitlands [1]
Category: Beetlejuice - Perfect/Brown & King
Genre: F/M, Multi, Pregnancy, despite the trigger warnings it's actually pretty fluffy, short and sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-26 02:49:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19759042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purpleeyesandbowties/pseuds/purpleeyesandbowties
Summary: Barbara's not sure why she's feeling sick all the time. Beetlejuice might have an answer for her, but it's certainly not the one she's expecting.





	Born-Dead

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for pregnancy, nausea, mentions of vomiting, and implied suicide/attempts. as always, i'm discreetly shipping beetlelands and i'm sidras-tak on tumblr. come chat!

For being dead, Barbara sure felt sick quite a lot. A concerning amount, actually. She couldn’t really be properly sick, not with no food in her stomach, but she could make a pretty good imitation of it, hunched over a toilet for the third time this week. Adam rubbed her back gently. She could feel the concern roll off him in waves. She wasn’t sure which was worse—that she couldn’t stop her own retching or that she couldn’t stop his worrying. After four months, they had finally settled in at the Deetzes’ (because it was their house now, not the Maitlands’ anymore) but this sudden bout of sickness had thrown a wrench into what had promised to be a pretty decent afterlife. The awful feeling abated for a moment and Barbara sat down on the floor, leaning her head against the wall to catch her breath.

“That was a bad one,” Adam said sympathetically. He kissed her sweaty hairline.

“Ugh,” Barbara moaned. It was the most articulate thing she could manage at the moment. Adam, bless him, understood her perfectly. He held out his hand and, when she took it, pulled her to her feet.

“Let’s go see if we can figure out what’s wrong, honey.”

They ran into Lydia, dressed in a black nightgown, in the hall. She was fuzzy-eyed from sleep and her hair was more floof than anything. Through a yawn, she asked, “are you still not feeling good, Maman?”

Barbara pasted on a smile—she didn’t want to worry Lydia with this, and really, seeing her surrogate daughter was reason enough to smile.

“Nothing to worry about, Lydia,” Barbara assured her. Lydia smiled in relief and gave both Adam and Barbara a quick hug before heading back to bed. Over her shoulder, she said, “maybe Beetlejuice will know what’s wrong?”

“Maybe,” Adam said dubiously. Barbara filed it away in her brain as a future possibility. Answers were important, yes, but right now, all she wanted to do was sleep.

—

She woke later in the day, feeling much more like herself. The only remnants of her early-morning bathroom spree were the strange feeling in her stomach and an aching back, which she chalked up to an hour kneeling on a hard floor. Adam was reading on the other side of the bed. She smiled indulgently. The man worried incessantly when she wasn’t feeling well. Adam always joked if one of them was sick, they both were, and stayed close by to fetch and comfort and soothe whatever she needed him to. 

“I was lucky to get you,” she said. He looked up from his book.

“You’re awake! Feeling better?”

“Much.” Not to be deterred from her line of thinking, she continued, “and even luckier to have died with you. You heard Beetlejuice—we died together. That never happens. If it had been just one of us, we’d be doing this alone.”

Adam frowned. “I don’t even want to think about that, Barbara.”

“No, really,” Barbara insisted. She sat up on her knees. “I couldn’t live without you and I sure as hell can’t be dead without you.” To her horror, tears sprung up in her eyes. Her voice, when it came out, was much shakier than she was comfortable with. “Adam, I don’t know what I would do if you weren’t here with me. I had been thinking of going on a walk that day. If you had fallen through the floor by yourself, I would probably be in the Netherworld, stuck behind a desk and—”

“Barbara, stop!” Adam shouted, slamming his book shut. She knew that look in his eye—one that promised he was on the edge of a bad mental spiral, one that she herself was currently teetering on the brink of. He left the room, sentence unfinished. Barbara swallowed hard, sitting back down on the bed.

“Fuck,” she muttered. Too much. She shouldn’t have said that. But it was true, wasn’t it? Was it? She was acting so un-Barbara-like now, to even think such things, let alone admit them. 

She sighed and got up. She’d stayed in the clothes she’d died in, but that didn’t stop her from taking them off and putting on pajamas. Anyone who couldn’t see ghosts would have seen a floating pair of pants and tank top, but anyone who couldn’t see ghosts wouldn’t be in this room of the house, anyway. She stripped down and grabbed her death-dress, finally failing at holding back the tears that had threatened her since she woke up. Nothing wrong with a quick cry while she pulled herself together. She had just gotten her undergarments on when there was a change in air pressure, a small popping sound, and a Beetlejuice lounging on her bed. Barbara whirled around, holding her dress to cover as much of her as possible.

“Beetlejuice!”

“Hey, Babs,” he said casually. “I heard you were having a domestic. Thought I’d swing by and see if I had a chance with ya.”

“Never,” Barbara promised. “Now can you let me change?”

“I’m not stopping you,” he said with a grin. She rolled her eyes. Beetlejuice kept up a steady stream of chatter as she changed. There would be no point in moving to a different room—he would just follow her there. So she turned her back and got it over with as quickly as possible. It was nice, actually. His constant noise gave her something else to focus on, and she felt her breathing even out and her tears slow. One piece of Beetlejuice’s chatter managed to stick in her brain, though. “…you and Adam are looking as tasty as ever, Babs. Especially you. Did you put on some weight? You know I love that in a woman.”

“How can I put on weight when I can’t eat?” Barbara asked. She did up the last of her buttons and turned around to face him. He shrugged. “Don’t ask me. You just look a little chunkier than the last time I saw you, is all.”

“Most ladies don’t appreciate being called fat,” she said absently. She put a hand against her stomach, measuring. Yeah, she did feel a little bigger than she had in the past. With no way to step on a scale, though, she really had no clue. And no reason to gain weight at all. Her hand dropped as a thought occurred to her.

“Beetlejuice, when you say you were born dead, what do you mean?”

“Huh? Exactly what I said, babe. Juno was a moderately successful businesswoman who decided she’d rather be dead than pregnant and then found out it didn’t matter either way. Gave birth to me in the Netherworld a few months later. Born while dead. Simple.”

Barbara’s hands dropped to her side. She could have screamed. She could have cried. They had tried so many times, second-guessed and hoped they were and hoped they _weren’t_ and then, just when they thought they might be ready, they died and Barbara had spent the past four months coming to grips with the fact the only child she’d ever raise was already almost grown up. It felt like a cruel joke, to know that she might have been wrong all along. She buried her face in her hands and gave herself a minute to breathe. Beetlejuice, sounding more concerned than she had ever heard him sound before said, “Hey—hey. What’s wrong? Are you….shit, B, are you pregnant?”

Barbara put a hand to her forehead. “Yeah, I think so.”

Beetlejuice let out a long hiss of air and raked a hand through his hair. “Okay, yeah, cool,” he said to himself. “I mean, I never pictured myself as a dad, but yeah, this could work. How hard can it be?”

He bounced up to Barbara and put an arm around her waist. He placed one hand over her stomach and said, “hey little guy-slash-girl-slash other, I’ll take care of you, don’t worry.”

“What are you talking about?” 

Beetlejuice made a gesture that could be interpreted as ‘duh’. “You’re preggers, Adam just broke up with you. I’m gonna be your baby daddy in his place.”

“I—Adam didn’t _break up with me!_ We had a fight, I said something stupid, he just needs some time to think.”

“But he made you cry,” Beetlejuice said, like it was the simplest thing in the world. Barbara held in a scoff. For all that he was an all-powerful, reality-bending, clever-witted demon, Beetlejuice could be pretty naïve when it came to thinks like human emotions and relationships.

“But we still love each other. Married couples fight and make each other cry sometimes. That’s just how love is.”

“Love sounds awful,” Beetlejuice muttered. He dropped his hand from Barbara’s middle. “So…that’s a no on me being a dad, then?” He sounded more than a little disappointed, which surprised Barbara. Nothing about him ever suggested that he might like to settle down, but here he was, looking like someone had just yanked a Christmas present away from him.

“That’s a no,” Barbara said. Then she hesitated. “Well, probably.”

Beetlejuice’s eyebrows shot up. “Probably?” he repeated.

Barbara shrugged. “It takes a village to raise a kid, right? And Lydia seems to benefiting from having a couple of different sets of parents. And I know I have no reason to trust you…” Some small part of Barbara told her to consider that Beetlejuice learned she was pregnant and his first genuine reaction was to offer to co-parent with her. Few men she knew, living or dead, would come to a decision like that, that quickly. She continued, “but you’ve been on pretty good behavior since you got back. So. I might trust you to babysit from time to time. _If_ you continue to be good.”

Beetlejuice’s face lit up. He scooped her up in his arms for one solid twirl. 

“I’ll be the goodest,” he promised.

Adam chose that moment to walk back in the door. If he was surprised to see his wife in a demon’s arms, he didn’t show it. Barbara had gotten good at reading Adam’s face over the years, and this expression promised that he was ready to make up, sorry he had stormed out, worried if she was still mad, ashamed of making her cry, and uncertain about how to go about an apology. Barbara skipped the hard part for him and kissed him.

“I had hoped you’d understand,” Adam said, relieved. He kissed her back.

“Oh, god,” Barbara said, dread mounting in her stomach as something else even scarier than the prospect of a baby occurred to her. She turned to Beetlejuice. “The baby isn’t going to be a demon like you, is it?”

“Nah, you should be good. I chose that myself. Teenage rebellion, you know? Most born-dead kids are more powerful than your average ghost, but between the three of us we should be able to handle them.”

“Born-dead? Are you talking about—?”

Barbara nodded. She felt her mouth turn up at the corners, a tiny fission of excitement stealing through her. “I think so. I’m not entirely sure how or why, but I think we’re having a baby.”

“But we’re dead,” Adam said dumbly.

“And your kid will be, too!” Beetlejuice said. “Just like me. Born-dead. That’s a relief, though, right? Born-dead kids can’t die, so you can raise them without that fear looming over you. There will be plenty of other things to be scared of, don’t worry.”

Adam shook his head as if to clear it. “Wait, hold on. We’re….having a baby?”

“Get with the program, A-dog,” Beetlejuice said loftily. He waggled his eyebrows and added, “and your wife promised me that if I behave myself, I can be your baby daddy.”

Adam gave Barbara a look that said ‘you didn’t!’ and she responded with a helpless shrug. 

“Our life is already so weird, why not let this happen too?” she whispered to him. “We’ll definitely talk more about this later, but. He calmed me down and talked things through with me. Plus, I kind of like having him around.”

“Traitor,” Adam muttered back, but he was smiling fondly at her. She could tell in this moment, he wouldn’t deny her anything. She wouldn’t deny him anything, either, not when the biggest, scariest dream of their lives (deaths) was happening, right here and right now.


End file.
